cendres.net

C’est marrant, j’ai comme l’impression ces derniers temps de ne parler que de Bruce Sterling, en particulier ses textes sur le design d’objet. Malheureusement le temps de trouver la mailing list du mouvement viridian voilà que son auteur principal décide d’y mettre un terme en nous livrant au passage une belle leçon sur le glocal lifestyle.

Is your home a museum? Do you have curatorial skills? If not, then entropy is
attacking everything in there. Stuff breaks, ages, rusts, wears out, decays.
Entropy is an inherent property of time and space. Understand this fact.
Expect this. The laws of physics are all right, they should not provoke
anguished spasms of denial.

You will be told that you should “make do” with broken or semi-broken tools,
devices and appliances. Unless you are in prison or genuinely crushed by
poverty, do not do this. This advice is wicked.

This material culture of today is not sustainable. Most of the things you own
are almost certainly made to 20th century standards, which are very bad. If we
stick with the malignant possessions we already have, through some hairshirt
notion of thrift, then we are going to be baling seawater. This will not do.

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings
created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from
today’s. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means
you should encourage the best industrial design.

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get
the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect
the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely “non-materialistic.” There is
nothing more “materialistic” than doing the same household job five times
because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking
black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

The last viridian note

What is “sustainability?” Sustainable practices navigate successfully through
time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable
is about time — time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to
material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that
are physically closest to you. Time and space.

The last viridian note

The Web is a layer of veneer over 20th century industrialism. It’s still a thin crispy layer, like landlord paint. It’s a varnish on barbarism.

The heat is on. The varnish is cracking as the barbarism grows more obvious, harder to bear.

The 20th century’s industrial infrastructure has run out of time. It can’t go on ; it’s antiquated, dangerous and not sustainable. It’s based on a finite amount of ice in our ice caps, of air in our atmosphere, of free room for highways and transmission lines, of room in the dumps, and of combustible filth underground. This is a gathering crisis gloomily manifesting itself in the realm of bad weather and resource warfare. It is the legacy we received from world-shaping industrial titans such as Thomas Edison, and Henry Fordn abd John D. Rockfeller – basically, the three 20th century guys who got us into the Greenhouse Effect.

It’s not use our starting from the top by ideologically re-educating the Consumer to become some bizare kind of rigid, hairshirt Green. This means returning to the benighted status of Farmers with Artifacts. End-Users will always legally and politically evade any effort to reduce them to the status of Consumers, and even Consumers will stoutly refuse to become Customers or Farmers ; they know that any such effort of repression is the path of the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban.

Bruce Sterling, Shaping things